Six Things We Want From Avengers 2

Originally Posted May 8th, 2012, at Playeraffinity.com

What little doubt remained over Marvel’s grand experiment of merging all its comic book franchises into one summer blockbuster pretty much evaporated this weekend, when The Avengers took audiences and the box office by storm. After being hinted at and set up over four years worth of superhero movies, the unprecedented collaboration paid off big time (+$200 million in 3 days big), and now Marvel is prepping for phase 2 of its theatrical master plan.

While those plans include an Iron Man 3, and sequels to Thor and Captain America (and maybe even a new Hulk movie), the golden goose continues to be The Avengers, and with earth’s mightiest heroes having earned some downtime following their explosive introduction, it leaves it to fans like us to speculate and guess what the future holds for Marvel’s flagship franchise. Here are a few suggestions to make sure that the future of this ultimate crossover doesn't become the story of a one-hit wonder, and if you’re among those few who have yet to actually see The Avengers, be warned, as minor spoilers follow.

Keep Joss Whedon as Writer and Director

This is definitely the most important factor determining the franchises’ future. The actors have all signed on for multi-film deals, but a return for writer and director Joss Whedon is still in question. The announcement of his involvement in The Avengers was the first big indicator to fans that Marvel was taking the project as seriously as they should have, and it’s hard to envision anyone having more clout in geek circles than Whedon. His TV background certainly didn’t hamstring the film’s flashy visuals, but it’s his ability to create a sympathetic character out of just about anyone that allowed The Avengers to be more than just a big dumb action movie. He’s just a fantastic storyteller, and anyone looking to fill his shoes will be hard pressed to accomplish anything half as charming, emotional, and well-constructed as what Whedon did in The Avengers.

Expand the Team 

While Marvel will definitely be trying to get some of its lesser known heroes into their own pictures before Avengers 2 (Edgar Wright sounds like he’d give-up his first born to do an Ant-Man movie), that shouldn’t limit the roster to just folks with a film under their belts. Hawkeye and Black Widow were successfully integrated as full members of the team despite previously only appearing in cameos, but the Avengers have had such a huge and constantly changing roster over the years, that throwing in a B-team wouldn’t hurt. The X-Men movies proved that audiences can get a quick handle on superpowered second-string heroes, so there’s no reason folks like Wasp, Black Panther, or Ms. Marvel can’t make their debuts here. Keep them around as side characters or cameos that can bounce off of the founding members, or be used as cannon fodder. Speaking of which...

Create a Greater Sense of Danger

By the time The Avengers rolls into its last act, and the team has finally assembled, it’s hard to imagine anyone or anything stopping them, whether it’s an alien army, or a malevolent demigod. Yes, the death of Agent Coulson was sudden and wrenching (in other words, classic Whedon), but we need to really see our heroes in danger if the pay-off for their triumphs is going to be exciting. Of course, killing off any of the big four would be crazy when they have their own franchises to carry, and already there are rumours of Black Widow and Hawkeye getting their own movies, but by the time Avengers 2 finally arrives, it may be time to dispose of a few members in the returning cast. It might sound harsh, but a surprise death or two would really raise the stakes, and help shore up the dramatics in a series that’s already mastered being fun.

Let’s See Avengers Tower

The end of The Avengers leaves Stark Tower in desperate need of some renovations, and it’s hinted at that the skyscraper will become the team’s new base of operations. While the S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier was a decent enough place to bring all the Avengers together, it’s made abundantly clear that an aircraft housing guys like Hulk and Thor is pretty dangerous when 50, 000 feet in the air. Putting them up in Avenger mansion would be a definite downgrade from a flying fortress, so the Tower is easily the most stylish option from the source material. Giving the team a place to call their own would help maintain the sense of community amongst the superfolks, and would be a great location to fill with little Marvel Easter eggs, the same way Odin’s Vault hid clues in Thor.

It’s Called the Marvel Universe for a Reason

Watching Hulk steer a robo-centipede into Grand Central Station was pretty cool, but there’s only so many ways to blow-up a major metropolitan city. Moving the action out of New York, and even off-planet, would help capture the immense scope many of The Avengers’ best stories have. Thor did a great job of simplifying the complicated Norse mythology behind the God of Thunder so that instead of being some sort of deity, he and his fellow Asgardians were essentially just space vikings, creating a precedent for galaxy-spanning adventures. It doesn’t have to be The Avengers: Mission on Mars, but exploring the wider reaches of the Marvel Universe even just a bit would really solidify the franchises’ reputation as an adaptation true to the source material.

Handle Thanos with Care

So unless you’re well-versed in your comic book lore, you were probably wondering who the smirking purple space ape in the non-shawarma related post-credits sequence was. That was Thanos, a death-worshipping alien from Saturn’s moon Titan, and he’s among Marvel’s biggest bads. Having him as the villain in Avengers 2 would support a lot of the things we’ve asked for here: Thanos is an interesting, extremely deadly villain in the Marvel universe, and would present an unprecedented threat to The Avengers, but he’d also be a tricky adversary to pull off correctly. He’s literally obsessed with Death, the female personification of mortality, so his motivations are more than a little unorthodox, and his costume, even compared to the guy’s like Cap and Thor, is kinda ridiculous. We’re not saying he’d be impossible to recreate for theatres, it’s just that it might be hard for audiences to buy a pyjama wearing death-fetishist with a penchant for jewellery as being the greatest for to face The Avengers, so a little bit of tinkering to the established character might be necessary.

Review: The Avengers

It’s pretty incredible that The Avengers is an actual movie and that it came out in theatres today. How many successful movies have been made by combining two separate franchises, let alone four? Comic books have cross-pollination ingrained in their DNA, particularly Marvel’s, but it was hard to imagine an Avengers movie as being anything other than a cash-in starring a bunch of  easily affordable no-names playing some of the biggest names in comics. So when Marvel decided to give each hero their own film so as to set-up the characters ahead of time and actively build towards this one amazing-mega-ultra-team-up, it showed an actual commitment to the idea of turning a super-group of superheroes into the kind of event movie it deserved to be. Getting geek icon Joss Whedon to write and direct the whole thing seemed itself almost too good to be true.

Yet here we are, four years after The Avengers was first teased at the end of Iron Man, with the greatest convergence in cinematic entertainment, pretty much ever, ready to blow audiences away. So, how is it? Well... it’s good, quite good even. That might sound reductive but the fact that The Avengers doesn’t collapse horribly beneath its own ambitions is an achievement unto itself. We have the stars and co-stars of four separate blockbuster franchises all stuffed into one single picture. Robert Downey Jr. is as rakish as ever playing billionaire Tony Stark, who dons the crimson and gold armour of Iron Man once more, but this time he’s joined by supersoldier-turned fish out of water Captain America (Chris Evans), fresh from a nasty plane crash-related hibernation. There’s also Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the warrior prince from another planet who wields Shakespearean verse and a nasty hammer in equal measure, as well as the big green guy himself, The Hulk, being kept in check by Marvel newcomer Mark Ruffalo as the giant’s low-key scientist alter-ego, Bruce Banner.

But wait, there’s more! Increasingly prominent S.H.I.E.L.D director Nick Fury gives Samuel L. Jackson greater opportunity to give grim looks from his one good eye, and has a new assistant (Cobie Smulders) to boot. Superhero scout and franchise connective tissue Agent Phil Coulson continues trying to get his ragtag team of metahumans together, and Thor’s scientist pal Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) is in tow as well. Then there’s the pair of assassin types, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who’ve been promoted from cameos to full-time world savers. Phew. Even at an arguably excessive 140 minutes, there is a lot going on in The Avengers, with no less than a dozen characters to introduce, both to each other, and audiences still a bit foggy on which one’s the time-displaced WWII vet and which one’s the Norse god.

Despite all the necessary groundwork laying that would hamstring the film’s leading up to it, The Avengers still has so much to get viewers up to speed on that it makes for a talky opening hour and a half. All the more reason to be thankful that it’s Whedon filling in the speech bubbles, as while his direction is clean and focussed, it’s his words that the movie really needed. Rather than settling for a glossy, one-shot crossover, great effort is made to develop the relationship each hero has with the others, while simultaneously maintaining the personalities established in each solo ventures before bringing them into the greater world of super-dom as a whole.

Whedon keeps things light, if not always brisk, with his trademark brand of self-aware humour, including more than a few riffs on costuming, which is funnier when coming from a guy wearing stars ‘n stripes pajamas. Getting everyone to play nice together is the story’s real conflict, as such varying powers and personalities create plenty of friction aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fancy new flying helicarrier. So once Thor’s mischievous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steals the Tesseract, a cosmic MacGuffin that’s been popping up all over the Marvel movie universe, with the intent of leading an extraterrestrial army to earth’s front door, the real threat is whether the heroes be able to survive each other long enough to save anybody else.

It leads to more than a few surprise turns to the established Marvel formula. There’s an emotional and political murkiness throughout, as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intentions are rarely transparent, and the personal conflicts bear out into much more globally conscious ones. The final act is as action-heavy as ever, with a full-blown intergalactic war ripping apart downtown Manhattan, and these setpiece closers were often the weakest link in the previous efforts, but here, it’s the culmination of 10 hours worth of set-up, so the catharsis is almost unparalleled. It’s a whole lot of CG destruction by monsters whose motives are about as vague as their species name, but it doesn’t matter because holy crap, Hulk just punched a mecha-baleen whale in the face! And wow, Thor just chip-shot an Acura into five aliens! With such a diverse array of badasses, the action beats switch fast but hit hard, even at the 2-hour mark. It’s raw spectacle, pure and simple, but because so much care has been put into making us love who’s putting on the show, it makes for one hell of a pay-off.

And through it all Whedon has, quite improbably, found a way to make every member of the all-star line-up relevant and matter. Hawkeye’s bow and arrow looks pretty measly when compared to the 8-foot tall Hulk, but his accuracy helps out in plenty of situations where smashing can’t. Perhaps most surprising is Johansson as Black Widow, who showed up in Iron Man 2 mostly just as eye candy, but now gets to quip and kick-ass along with everybody else. The team spirit that the Avengers is based on manages to not just survive, but invigorate the big screen translation, and you’ll know it once you see the requisite but charming after-credits sequence (of which there are two, so be sure to stick around). The story itself is simple and occasionally contrived (true to comics, mind-control is a big factor), but it’s built on a foundation of wonderful characters whose interactions within that story are what keep you engaged, be they flashy or funny.

It might seem odd to end talking about another comic franchise but the recently released final trailer for The Dark Knight Rises will likely play before your screening of The Avengers. It gives a stark comparison between what Christopher Nolan is doing with Batman and what Marvel has done with The Avengers. While Nolan wants to create a case for artistic filmmaking within the blockbuster framework, Marvel has once again done what they’ve proven themselves best at; making fun, highly entertaining comic book movies that are effortlessly easy to enjoy. Nolan might be pushing the expectations for the genre, but The Avengers reminds us that just because something’s a spectacle, doesn’t mean it can’t be satisfying. Even better, you can bet there will be plenty of new Avengers fan ready to assemble when the team’s next outing arrives in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

4 out of 5

Review: The Cabin in the Woods

Between trailers that give away the whole plot, a dearth of original stories, and the stream-of-conscience babbling of social media, it’s hard for a movie to surprise you anymore. So it is with great excitement that I ask you to keep whatever you hear about The Cabin in the Woods to a minimum. Watch the trailer, read spoiler-free reviews (such as this one) and plug your ears as soon as anyone starts talking about it in detail. Do that, and you’re in for one of the most surprising, entertaining and just plain fun movie experiences to come along in years.

You might not assume that, given the succinctness of the title, which provides about as much background info as you’ll need. The film follows five college kids who escape the city to spend a weekend at a remote, foliage-bound retreat. “It doesn’t even show up on the GPS,” says one, while stoner Marty (Fran Kranz) rolls joints in the back of their RV. Good girl Dana (Kristen Connolly) is among the vacationers, having been roped into the trip as an excuse to meet hunky new guy Holden (Jesse Williams). Isolated location? Check. Drugs? Check. Sex? Check. You know the drill.

And that’s the point. If you’re betting there’s a pit stop at a derelict gas station run by a backwoods yokel who warns the kids “don’t go up to that cabin,” congratulations, you’re part of the film’s target demographic; people overly tired of the horror genre. The “teens going on vacation to a secluded location, only to fall prey to malevolent forces” playbook is on full, gleeful display here, featuring familiar character archetypes stuck in an ominous cabin that’s just begging for a coat of red paint.

What you might not expect are the little differences that accrue as we head toward the inevitable killing spree. Despite their inherent disposability, the characters have a charm and likeability that’s unusual for your average slasher-movie fodder. That jock Curt (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth) knows his way around a sociology textbook, as well as a football field, is among the first of many, many, tweaks to the established canon.

It all starts to make sense once you know that the film was co-written and produced by Joss Whedon. The creator of cult-favourites Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly is celebrated for his ability to craft interesting characters through witty and relatable dialogue, something that has survived the big screen transition. That such a grounded voice is behind next month’s big-budget comic book extravaganza, The Avengers, would seem odd, had he not already proven himself a master at repurposing genre conventions, as he did for superheroes in the web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard makes his directorial debut here (and also has a co-writing credit), and if these two films share a theme, it’s blowing stuff up. The difference is that The Cabin in the Woods is about mass-destruction of ideas; the filmmakers have set out to destroy or exploit everything you’ve come to expect from scary movies, and they take to the task with style and verve. Though the influx of camera-winking and self-reference in the genre’s recent past has given it some new life (Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil comically spun the same subset of horror last year), Whedon and Goddard take it to such an extreme that the sly wink is more like a proudly flying middle finger.

You could argue that they’re more interested in giving cheeky commentary on established nail-biter tropes than in coming up with real scares of their own, and you’d be right. Fear takes a backseat here, but in its place is an infectious lunacy. If you’ve watched the trailer, you’ll know that there’s more to this cabin than initially appears, as glimpses of the condemned under surveillance hint at a conspiratorial element to the slaughter. It’s no matter to learn that criminally underrated comedic talents Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins are among those keeping watch. Who they are, and what their job is, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Their story runs parallel to that of the beset teens, but early impressions of the voyeurs would have you think they’re living in a totally different world. Again, this is all intentional, as what starts as a simple story quickly spirals into territory of such grand, bizarre scope, that it makes the destruction of New York in Cloverfield look like small potatoes. There’s an actual mythology at play here, one that just barely keeps the story afloat, but also filters the entire genre through a new, wonderfully skewed lens.  Nearly every conceivable take on horror gets a shout-out here, with clear references to The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, even Lovecraft, to name a meagre few. Some shots are so packed with Easter eggs and detail, you’ll wish the theatre had a pause button.

While Goddard’s technical quibbles arise from aping his inspirations a bit too closely (the lighting can be poor and the CGI deserved a budget befitting its ambition), those with any appreciation for gore, monsters or just a good scare, owe it to themselves to see this movie. From its charming beginnings to its balls-out insane third act (complete with an ingeniously twisted finale), you’ll be hard pressed to find a film in recent memory that’s as inventive, or flat-out fun, as The Cabin in the Woods.

4 out of 5